Calls for Papers: 'Digital Labour'

Feminist Review is calling for articles and Open Space pieces for a themed issue on Digital Labour.

Digital labour refers to a range of tasks executed by humans on, in relation to, or in the aftermath of digital platforms. On-demand logistics services, micro-work platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, data economies generated by social media sites and online retail portals all comprise digital labour. So does the emotional work of withstanding the stress of high-tech workplaces with long hours and nebulous corporate Human Relations (HR) policies. To the extent that it is mediated by platforms, digital labour is also intrinsically bound to hardware: mobile phones, computers, and data servers on which software runs and operates. What is common in the many forms of digital labour is an active celebration of worker flexibility, from the precarious workers concentrated in sectors of the Western labour market, to the non-Western countries where vast swathes of online and below-the-line work happens. As such, digital platforms supply an actual labour market with large numbers of individuals virtually excluded from formal employment and consigned to permanently unstable working conditions. Digital labour is thus experienced predominantly as a modern version of on-demand piecework.

Issue editors: Melissa Gregg and Rutvica Andrijasevic. If you would like to discuss your ideas for this issue, please contact the editors at melissa.gregg@intel.com and ra14611@bristol.ac.uk (Rutvica Andrijasevic).

Full articles or Open Spaces pieces to be submitted by 16 May 2018.

Manuscripts should be submitted through Feminist Review’s online submission system and in FR house style. See http://www.feminist-review.com/ and http://www.palgrave-journals.com/fr/author_instructions.html.